That’s just three of the items linked to D.B. Cooper, the infamous skyjacker who jumped from Northwest Orient Airlines 727 flight with $200,000 in ransom somewhere between Seattle and Portland on November 24, 1971.

And now two paragraphs in a 40th anniversary story by The Telegraph of London newspaper have reignited the D.B. Cooper flame.

Over the weekend, FBI officials in Seattle said they had a “credible” lead in the form of physical evidence and a name in the D.B. Cooper case. The evidence has been sent to the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia.

FBI agent Fred Gutt said Monday the bureau is following up a “credible” lead in the unsolved case and is focused on a suspect who died more than 10 years ago.

Gutt said the bureau received a tip from a retired law enforcement source about the dead man possibly being Cooper. FBI agents requested personal effects of the possible suspect, who died of natural causes.

The FBI is trying to find fingerprints or DNA on the dead man’s effects to compare with items the hijacker left behind. The FBI said three years ago that it found DNA evidence on the clip-on tie Cooper left on the plane before he jumped.

Gutt said the FBI has already tested one item of the dead man’s belongings for fingerprints. It was not conclusive. They are now working with surviving family members to gather other items for further testing.

The man who jumped gave his name as Dan Cooper and claimed shortly after takeoff from Portland that he had a bomb, leading the flight crew to land the plane in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes and 10,000 $20 bills.

The flight then took off for Mexico with the suspect and flight crew on board before the man parachuted from the plane, jumping into a raging rainstorm and sub-freezing temperatures.

In 1980, Brian Ingram, a building contractor from Arkansas, was 8 years old tossing a Frisbee with family members on a sandbar along the Columbia when he discovered three stacks of $20 bills totaling $5,800, part of Cooper's payoff.

FBI spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich told The Seattle Times on Sunday that the new information was the “most promising lead we have right now,” but cautioned that investigators were not on the verge of breaking the case.

“With any lead our first step is to assess how credible it is,” Sandalo Dietrich said. “Having this come through another law enforcement (agency), having looked it over when we got it - it seems pretty interesting.”

View full sizeFBIOfficials believe Cooper bailed out of the airplane somewhere over Ariel, Wash.

Federal investigators have checked more than 1,000 leads since the suspect bailed out on Nov. 24, 1971, but for all his notoriety, there is no record of Cooper ever landing on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

Some of the best reading on the man, the myth and the mystery can be found on the FBI’s own website. Particularly interesting are the theories of FBI agent Larry Carr, who took over the case in 2007. In 2009, Carr said he believes Dan Cooper—the name of a popular French comic book character, and the name Cooper used when he bought his $18.52 one-way airplane ticket from Portland to Seattle— served in the Air Force and at some point was stationed in Europe.

Carr theorized that Cooper may have worked as a cargo loader on planes, and would have been familiar with parachutes. Carr thought Cooper may have lost his job during the upheaval in the aviation industry in Seattle and was a loner who would not be missed when he disappeared.

Carr subscribed to the theory that Cooper died in the jump.

He told the Seattle PI when Cooper jumped from the plane, “he just started tumbling, right then, tumbling, panics and once you panic you can’t do anything. He’s out of control…and can’t pull his chute, and hits the ground without opening his chute.

"But he came from somewhere and from someone,” Carr said. “And that is what we want to know."